lake

Instead of rowing in the morning, I had breakfast with the kids. This means I had to row at the end of this hot summer day. When I drove to the rowing club, the thermometer in the car indicated 33 degrees C. The schools are not closed yet, but there are no more exams, so many people are going to the lake to swim and get some coolness.

I put plastic foil over the damaged part of the hull, then put strong, watertight tape around the edges, and finally on top, almost like a gauze. There is no way for water to get into the structure now. The real repair will be done on Monday or Tuesday.

I just rowed steady state, with a couple of interruptions for swimmers and small boats. I was pretty tired after the long row on Wednesday, so I stayed very low in power.

Thursday was a long working day with lots of long and difficult meetings. Having been in the US for 10 days, a couple of local things piled up, and I had to take care of them. I arrived at the rowing club at 6:45pm. Just as on Wednesday, it was another nice, sunny, windless day.

The workout I wanted to do, despite being very tired, still jetlagged, etc, was a 3x2k with 5 minutes rest, OTW.

Leaving the changing room, I remembered I wanted to replace the battery in my oarlock. But I didn’t want to return to my locker, open it, go through my bag to find the spare batteries, and I decided to risk it without replacing the battery.

It was also getting pretty late, and my son would be waiting for me to drive home after the training. He has (his age group) National Champs a week from now, and this week they are doing two trainings per afternoon/evening.

I decided to compromise on the warming up, doing only 1k. Then I aligned at the start of our 2k course and set off.

According to my CP plot on rowsandall.com, my 100% 2k power is 270-280W, assuming a duration of 8 to 9 minutes (or 500 to 550 seconds). I decided that rowing the 3x2k at 85-90% of that (230-250W) would be a good target. I was still suffering from business travel tiredness, and I have experience that the risk of handing down in such a situation is real.

The empower oarlock kept losing connection and reconnecting. Only during the second interval, I lost connection about 500m in and it didn’t reconnect, as the red graph above shows. In terms of stroke rate and pace, the rows looked as follows:

I was scared to look at the Heart rate data, because I feared high values. Indeed:

Still, I think it was a good workout. Despite rating higher in every interval, my effective length stayed pretty constant, even getting longer as the training progressed.

Also, the average power was around 250W (roughly 90% of max over 2k) and I didn’t have problems finishing the workout.

No training. Departed from Atlanta in the evening, arriving in Paris CDG at 10:30am, then a (delayed) flight to Vienna and a drive to Brno. As my entire family was on the rowing club, I went there directly.

Took the single for a short (low expectations) paddle. Things were great. Somehow the single felt really light. Perhaps the water has warmed up a bit. Perhaps it is the lighter rigging of my boat compared to the boats in Atlanta.

A couple of spikes on the Power graph. The Empower Oarlock disconnected and reconnected a few times during the row. I used a borrowed SpeedCoach, with a lower battery level. Also, I think I need to replace the battery in the Oarlock.

The temperatures have increased to above 30 degrees C, but luckily we were rowing in the evening.

It had been s hectic day. After a four hour drive back from Racice, we found our poor cat in distress. It had injured its tail and during the twelve hours it had spent alone, it had sprayed blood all over the house. So instead of relaxing in our garden we took care of the wound (which was not easy, as is evident from the claw marks on my arms) with help of a rowing friend who lives nearby and is a vet. On Monday we visited him in his office for a check, some injections and antibiotics, as well as a cap to prevent the poor animal from biting its painful tail again.

So when I arrived at the rowing club, my rowing friends were still discussing the European Championships, but I had already moved on to another world.

Anyway, we are racing the eight coming weekend so it is time to get to business. The training plan prescribed 1500m pieces at 26spm but the crew wanted to add a race pace piece. The compromise was one 1500m and one 750m.

I gave the SpeedCoach to the cox because his CoxBox Mini doesn’t show stroke rate. I told him to not touch any buttons on the SpeedCoach and started its recording when we still had the boat in slings. Unfortunately I forgot to switch the screen to distance, so the cox had only elapsed time and stroke rate. He managed well and just did the pieces by estimated distance from landmarks. For the 1500 that was easy: from the 2k start to the Lodni Sporty club house. For the 750 it was a bit more difficult.

But rowsandall.com can deal with that. Sitting on 2 seat the SpeedCoach didn’t record my heart rate. However, I was using the Garmin watch to capture that. After the row, I imported the Garmin data through Strava to rowsandall.com, uploaded the SpeedCoach data and did a data fusion merging the NK pace, SPM, and distance data into the Garmin workout.

Then, I used the Interval Editor and the interactive plot to determine the start and end times of the pieces and here is the result:

Ignore the power data. It’s a conversion from pace using the equation for the Concept2 erg and when you’re in the eight it overestimates the power. I will update the site to do a better power estimate for OTW rows.

A quick steady state row in the single. It was very rough out there but rowable on the north part of the lake:

Friday Morning

A data drama! First, I forgot to switch on the recording on the SpeedCoach during the warming up, missing the first 2.5km. Then, half way through the row, the SpeedCoach screen flashed “Memory Full” at me. I remained calm, thinking that there would be another hour of recording left. Nope. The SpeedCoach memory fills up quickly when you use the Empower Oarlock. Missing the final 5km of the row.

Today’s conditions were pretty interesting. Mirror flat, dreamlike, in the north part, and a small ripples in the south part. The ripples were of the unpredictable kind, so they added a little bit of challenge to the rowing. It was fun to work on technique, trying to perfectionize some aspects of technique on the mirror part, then trying to take that to the unsteady part.

For the rowsandall.com demo in Racice, I had ordered a new tablet computer online, with a store that has pretty good next-day delivery and a pick-up facility very close to the rowing club. The promised delivery time was 8:00 AM on Thursday but they missed that and the order stayed in the “preparation” state. This morning I drove to the pick-up facility. While I was driving, they sent me an email with apologies and telling me that they would deliver on Sunday evening. No way. I went in and canceled the order.

Then drove to a brick-mortar store to quickly get a decent tablet, which proved to be harder than I thought. The good old brick-mortar stores are mainly just showrooms and when you tell the personnel that you want to buy a certain type, they walk you to a terminal where they fill out an on-line order for you.

In the end I found the only place where I could wave my credit card and just take the device with me, so I ended up buying an Apple Ipad Mini 4. I would have preferred a slightly bigger screen, but OK.

Talking about the screen of this thing, this made me go for the Apple products in the end. I am looking for a device to demo rowsandall.com, and it better look good when I show it to people. The iPads are really shining here.

The wind was strong and the water was very choppy, but I didn’t want to shy away from rowing high stroke rates in the chop. You never know what the conditions will be on race day.

The official training plan (from our club’s head coach) asked for 2x(4x250m/250m)/5min. I decided that I would do three sets of four. The prescribed stroke rate was “Race SPM+2”, and I decided that that would be 34spm. I wanted to row each 250m as the respective 250m segment in a 1000m race, so the first one from a standing start and the final one with a desparate push to the finish line. Race simulation on a chilly and rainy Thursday morning. I had the entire choppy surface of the lake for myself.

Pushed off the dock and rowed to the end of “Rokle”, where the water was a bit flatter. After the row, I discovered that I had not switched on the SpeedCoach for this 2.5 km of warming up. This always upsets me a bit. 2500m of unrecorded rowing!

On the SpeedCoach, I programmed the workout as 8x250m with no rest. When I got ready to start, I noticed that I had already moved 3 meters and the clock was ticking. Must have been the wind. So I set off and rowed. The final 100m of the first 250m is in a slight turn to starboard, so I was recording lower power on my (starboard) Empower oarlock.

This first set was done with tailwind. I forgot to focus on anything, except the final sprint in the fourth interval.

The second set of intervals was in headwind. After the first set, I noticed a ship steaming towards Rokle, so I decided to do the first two intervals in front of our rowing club. Worse chop and stronger wind, but no need to be on the alert for potential collisions. One of my club mates made a very wise remark yesterday: “The more tired you get, the more important it is to keep the technique perfect.” It is true, when the drive force starts to diminish, you get tired, your posture gets a little less strong, and the decline in boat speed keeps increasing.

The final set of intervals was in tailwind. I started them at the same point as the first interval. After the second set of intervals I was of course tired, but I judged that I should be able to finish another set.

I finished the workout with a 2 km paddle in the most choppy part of the lake.

All in all it was a good workout. I was happy that I managed to get the stroke rate up (at the cost of a slight reduction in finish angle, I am afraid). It was hard work to stay technically together in the windy and choppy conditions, and it was also hard work get the power output in the desired range.

I am trying to get in another workout at the end of the day. I will spend the coming weekend in Racice (where I did the training camp in the spring) to attend (not compete, of course) the European Rowing Championships, so I need to get my training load in before Saturday.

I was hesitating if I should take a rest day or not after the races, but during the working day on Monday I made the decision to rest. Four times 1k in one weekend is not a very heavy training load, but you add to that the stress of boat transport, race management, and other things and then it is understandable why I didn’t feel like training much.

The plan changed when I made a phone call with our club’s president who reminded me that we had agreed to row in the eight on Monday. OK. So I was going to make an exception for training in the eight. We haven’t had a single session with the complete line-up and I haven’t rowed in the eight a single time, having work travel interfere. The race is on June 3. Actually, I personally tried to persuade the team that it doesn’t make sense to row this race. Part of the team is undertrained. Some of them haven’t really managed their weight, and some of them have injuries. I did reject an offer from a faster eight out of club loyalty, but this year the eight has not been a good experience.

I decided to head to the club earlier than our 6pm agreed time and get my boats off the trailer and prepare them for the next few weeks of training. That means washing, checking, and jotting down equipment replacement items that I need to purchace at the next occasion.

6pm. Three of the eight had arrived.

6:30pm. Seven out of the eight had arrived, but we could row if the cox would row and one of our Juniors could cox. Unfortunely, the Junior’s mother did not allow that. The guy had to be at home doing homework.

7pm. I drove home.

In the evening I took a detailed look at the programs for Bled (World Masters Regatta) and Trebon (Czech Masters Open), because the weekend in Hodonin had resulted in some offers and requests. Oh, the days when coaches made line-ups! Now, as a Master, it is a complex dance of who wants to row with whom, which combination would be fast, and keeping track of half and full promises made, as well as the actual race schedule. Also, you can be sure that in parallel other rowers are exploring options, so there is no time to wait for the best offer. For me personally, club loyalty, personal sympathies and speed potential are almost equal parameters in the equation.

Tuesday – Steady State

I didn’t sleep well, was up very early, so I decided to row early and have more time for a session before work than usual. The training plan had “Race SPM+2” intervals, but driving to the rowing club I considered swapping this for a longer steady state session. I had done enough of sprinty work (at race pace) over the weekend and I knew that the eight training on Wednesday (if there would be one) would be biased to doing speed work as well (although that will be very painful speed work when you haven’t done base rowing together). I want to respect a rough 80/20 division of base work versus high intensity work. Finally, my legs were very clearly not recovered from the weekend activities. As our rowing club is on a hill, putting out the sculls you climb and descend a bit and that is always a good moment to “feel” how recovered you are. Not recovered.

So Steady State it was going to be. It turned out to be a great session. A gray morning, back on my home lake, lots of race moments from the past weekend to replay in the mind, and relatively flat water, so working on boat run would be possible.

And here is how this session (the last box) compares with comparable sessions over the past month, for a few metrics:

The session on April 23 was an Indoor Rower workout which I accidentally added to the selection. Instead of redoing all the plots, I decided to leave the data there. Just for fun, I decided to look at heart rate vs distance for all those sessions:

Doing this from the Team page on Rowsandall.com, I accidentally added a workout by Greg Smith into the mix (sorry Greg). It’s a little bit a “bowl of spagetthi chart”. I think these comparisons are easier when you pick two sessions.

Training Planning

I have spent my car driving time catching up with the excellent rowing training science podcasts from bRowShow and that inspired me to take a critical look at how I am doing this season, and evaluating if I need to change the training blocks in the run-up to the Czech Masters Open (middle July) and Worlds Masters Regatta (early September).

This first plot is from Stravistix, and it shows training volume (in hours) vs date for the past few years. This is quite a fun plot, because it falsifies my feeling that I am doing less volume than last year. In terms of hours trained, the numbers are quite comparable.

Here is how my training load and performance looks on SportTracks.mobi:

And here is an equivalent graph from the desktop version of SportTracks:

And here is the Stravistix version:

It’s interesting to see how much difference a slightly different setting of the integration constants makes. So my Cumulative Training load and Accute Training load seem to be lower than a year ago, but the Performance is similar? Interesting. I guess the races will prove this, but it is true that I don’t feel like I am slower than a year ago. It is also interesting to see that even though Stravistix tells me that my training hours, YTD, are quite similar, the training load numbers of the two SportTracks versions are more in line with my feeling that I am doing less volume. The training load number for Stravistix suggests that this year is a copy of 2016.

Anyway, it is what it is. I cannot magically add training volume in the next couple of weeks. So this is the state of my training bank account and now I have to decide how to invest in the coming few weeks. Here is roughly how I am going to do it (and feel free to critique):

Of course, this is just what I am doing in the 20%. The rest will be base steady state, technique, cross-training. We’re going to spend 2 weeks in the mountains on vacation. I am going to lobby for taking the mountainbikes, because I think that the MTB could be a nice way to do short interval bursts (riding uphill).